


The blanket fort and the sunrise

by orphan_account



Category: Marvel (Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Amazing Spider-Man (Movies - Webb)
Genre: Fluff, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kid Fic, M/M, TASM 2, mentions of norman osborn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-18
Updated: 2014-05-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 14:51:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1652597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You were there for me when my parents..." </p><p>Where Peter has just lost his parents and Harry wonders what 'forever' means.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The blanket fort and the sunrise

**Author's Note:**

> The summer exam session is approaching faster and faster, and I'm here writing teeth-achingly sweet fluff between Harry and Peter! Of course! And which, apparently, is a totally unpopular ship! Of c-WHYYYYY!!1 They are so good together omg I have so many ideas for them! WHY DON'T YOU LOVE THEM??? *sobs in the sleeve*

It’s a freezing cold morning when Harry receives the call. He’s getting prepared for school, or more precisely his nanny is preparing him, his school bag carefully hoisted in her  arms, when the butler ushers himself in the room with a starkingly white piece of paper in his hands. It’s a perk of his, writing every tiny message down in those perfectly-cut memos of his.

Harry wonders who could possibly want him at this time in the morning, the only person who he can think of is his father, but he has already gone to work. And work is always his number one preoccupation.

“It’s a message from Mr Parker, little sir.” Harry’s eyebrows get shot in his forehead at the mention of Peter’s father and the butler must have realized too, since he quickly corrects himself. “Mr Parker Junior.”  

“Oh? What does Peter want?”

The butler slowly turns his piece of paper in his hands. When he bows, his long nose becomes comically long, Harry thinks, but Peter has told him that it’s not fair to make fun of the man for something he can do nothing about. Whatever. 

“He would like to inform the young sir that he is unable to attend school today. He profusely apologized for the inconvenience.”

There is something wrong, feels Harry instantly. Peter came to school with the flu once, although he didn’t realize he had it, and he usually asks for Harry to take extra notes and bring them to his home later. This time he didn’t.

〜 〜 〜

He calls Peter back and tell his aunt that he is coming to visit. Aunt...May, he thinks her name is, almost doesn’t say anything but at the end of the call Harry can hear a faint ‘thank you’ from the other end of the line. Odd. 

His driver drops him in front of the school and it takes Harry fifteen minutes, and he runs almost all of them, to reach Aunt May’s and Uncle Ben’s house.

 

〜 〜 〜

 

Harry doesn’t know why, if someone asked him now, but he imagined that Peter relatives’ house would be cold, as cold as this morning, if not much, much more.

He thinks so when Aunt May tells him what happened.

He is half-tempted to say that Peter’s parents will come back in a couple of days, you just see, they must have gone somewhere for work, but even as he thinks that several questions pop up in his mind. If it was for work, why leaving so suddenly? Once, Peter’s dad left for three days and Peter was so miserable, his mother asked Harry if he could sleep at theirs. And if they had, that instant, to go somewhere, and not tell Peter beforehand or where or why, Harry thinks, they will come back soon. Right? And what he stares at, while thinking this, and listening to Aunt May’s tender words, is Uncle Ben, leaning on the counter of the kitchen, as rigid as one of those greek statues in the museums.

“Are they gone...forever?” he whispers.

He thinks he grasped the concept of forever, by now, he’s 10 years old, after all, he’s a big boy. Forever is a long time, a _really long_ time. Forever is his dad’s leadership of the family company, forever is the family company, forever is the Osborn residence in New York, with a summer residence in Japan and a winter residence in Australia.

Aunt May caresses his long locks, her touch ghosting over the tip of his ears, as she smiles in a sad way.

Harry can’t see what Uncle Ben is doing, because his vision is overwhelmed by aunt May’s apologetic expression, but he hears a heavy, dragged-out sigh and equally heavy, slow footsteps, trudging out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

That’s right, Harry thinks. Peter’s room will always be in the right corner of the first floor of the house. They found it funny, at the time, that Peter’s room in his parents’ house and in his relatives’ house, was in the same position, Harry likes it because it’s secluded and looking north-east, so he saw the sun popping up among the roofs of the sorrounding low houses, during the winter saturday mornings he spent with Peter.

In those occasions, before smushing his face in the pillow and going back to sleep, he imagined what it would be, waking up with Peter, prepare themselves for school, having breakfast together. And going to school together, separating half-ways where their destinations forced them to go their separate ways, only to meet again at the same spot 6 hours later and spend the rest of the day together, doing their homework, playing, having dinner….

He mapped out whole days in those brief moments of half-awereness.

He sometimes wonders what it means.

 

〜 〜 〜

 

 

Sometimes he doesn’t wonder.

When Harry is prompted to go “snuggle” with Peter for a bit, if he wants, Uncle Ben is nowhere in sight, but he left the door to Peter’s room open, so Harry takes it as a further invitation.

He wonders if Peter knows he’s here, Aunt May and he have spoken so softly in the kitchen, after all.

For a moment Harry thinks about jumping on Peter and screaming and shaking him. He doesn’t know why he thinks that it would help, but he does.

However, Peter’s bed is a heap of mismatched blankets and pillows. Everything else seems to be in perfect order.

Harry doesn’t recognize the mess the typical mess they would make in this same room when they played together.

It’s as if Aunt May came in and tidied everything up. In fact, it looks like nothing but the bed has been touched since a while.

Harry tries to remember when it was the last time he visited. It was scorching hot outside, and humidity clogged his breath.

Finally, he sees the barest movement under the blankets, and understands.

 

〜 〜 〜

 

 

Without further thought, Harry dives under the covers and makes grabby hands in the suddenly warm semi-darkness until he finds a warmer body.

Peter retreats in himself with a sound of protest before Harry can even understand if he touched his arm or his leg. They stay like that for an endless minute.

“Pete.” whispers Harry.

The sunlight streams in timidly from the passage Harry created but he collects his legs fully on the matress after having kicked off his shoes, bundling himself too.

The light makes the 'sounds of the night' impossible to hear. And now Harry feels like he needs to listen to precisely those noises he dreads to hear when he lies alone in bed in his huge room.

He tries and tries to be quiet but it's only after a couple minutes, after he is calm and relaxed enough that he manage to hear something. And there it is. A tiny trail of whimpers.

Harry rushes to scoot towards the sounds until he finds soft cotton fabric. A pajama maybe?

He grabs the elbow that was moving to push him away and drapes himself on Peter’s back.

They jostle a bit, Peter huffing his protests, when Harry’s nose hits the top of Peter’s head and maybe it's in that precise moment which Peter decides to calm down, or maybe  it's because Harry is so woundly tight around Peter that he is spooning his friend.

Either way, they settle down like this for a while.

 

〜 〜 〜

 

 

“Peter.” whispers Harry against his friend’s straight hair.

“Pe-ter. Pete. Shiny teeth. Straight bangs. Peeeeeteeee…” whines Harry.  

Soon, yet reluctantly, Peter turns around. Harry watches his friend’s face in the semi-darkness. But not hearing Peter’s greeting, Peter’s voice, makes him more and more uneasy.

Harry’s breath comes out in a sigh, half-desperate half-frustrated. Peter opens his mouth, as if to say something, but then he furrows his brows, his whole face scrunching up a bit, and closes his mouth.

Harry exhales a breath he didn’t know he was holding. He scoots nearer until his vision is full of Peter’s face, there isn’t space for anything else. Peter’s eyes are so big and so brown, like the hot cocoa he likes so much.

“I’m here with you.” Harry says and he instantly recognizes the banality of the statement. But Peter’s expression doesn’t convey ‘ _duh_ ’, it conveys surprise and something else, something impalpable at the edge of Harry’s comprehension.

And maybe of Peter's too.

They breath quietly, looking at each other, until Harry starts talking about his day. But since it's just the morning he decides to talk about his previous evening too, then honework, then his previous day at school, but he stops then, because he saw Peter the previous morning, only they talked about how excited Peter was about his mother's meat pie.

Also, Harry thinks with a vague sense of pride, he didn't mention his father once. Well that's because he last saw his father 4 days earlier, while he was almost running to his office in the Osborn residence, but Harry still takes the merit.

Harry looks at where he's been grabbing Peter's elbows and he looks up. Peter is making a face that screams ' _i miss them so much_ ' and ' _i want my mom and dad_ ' but he doesn't say so. Instead, he starts crying.

 

〜 〜 〜

 

 

Quietly, at first, his face scrunching up until he closes his eyes and his mouth seems to open by itsel.

It’s a silent plead, a silent scream of pain and frustration and Harry panics for two seconds maybe but then he pulls Peter’s arms towards himself and hugs him at the best of his limited movements. He listens to Peter’s sobs, acute and short then more wet and interposed with hiccups.

Harry has absolutely no idea about what he should do.

His father has always disapproved of him crying with a tilted eyebrow and downward lips and the last time he cried loudly (about a toy maybe) it was his nanny who comforted him, but it’s just a foggy memory of when he was very little and his nanny surely did not dare hug him.

So he thinks that maybe just lying there, curled up with Peter is enough, but Peter is his best ~~(and only)~~ friend and he just lost parents, maybe ‘ _forever_ ’, and he feels pathetically inadequate to the task.

What was he thinking, that he would be able of comforting his friend?

In his defense, he didn't know about his parents before Aunt May told him. So why did he climb the stairs afterwards? He wanted to see Peter. But he can’t even console him, maybe he’s making it worse..!

Harry’s thoughts get clogged in his throat as he pushes himself slightly off of Peter to speak.

“I don’t know what to do Pete. I don’t know what to tell you. Really. I don’t know if you should cry or if I'm supposed to tell you not to cry. Maybe I should just go. I’ll tell your Aunt to come up.”

“Noooo!” Harry doesn’t understand where the voice comes from at first but he soon realizes that it’s Peter’s sobbing voice, speaking for the first time. “No! I don’t wanna!”

Harry doesn’t understand what Peter doesn’t want but he feels like the situation slipped from his hands now, so he lets go of his friend’s arms and tries to scoots further back.

“Ok, I’ll call Aunt May. She’ll know what to do. Sorry..” Yes, Harry thinks, Aunt May will know what to do.

He gets on his knees on the bed and motions to crawl out of the duvet’s vault when a sudden tug makes him fall back on the matress.

Harry almost snaps, not being used to being manhandled like that, an offended frown already on his face, but as he turns he finds that Peter, who is crying his eyes out at this point, has grasped his uniform’s soft belt.

“I dun' wanna you ‘t gooo!” He cries out in desperation.

For a moment Harry feels like he’s in front of a toddler and that he’s years older than this whining boy. Then he remembers the situation and that this is his best friend, the scrawny kid who goes around with heroes’  figurines stuck in his pockets and helps him with his chemistry homework, and he scoots back and hugs Peter, without an ounce of hesitation this time.

“I know, I know. Sorry. I said it, right? I’m here. I’m here for you.” keeps on saying Harry, waiting for Peter to calm down.

And he does. Eventually.

When he doesn’t have tears to shed anymore, he hiccups, when his throat starts hurting, he hyperventilates and when Harry tries to massage his back in a vain attempt to coax his laboured breath back to a normal pace, Peter slips out of consciousness altogether.

While Peter sleeps Harry trudges downstairs again, but at first he doesn't think it was the best idea, because Aunt May gasps and brings her hands to her mouth as soon as she sees him and rushes to him, trimming his locks back in order, whispering “Oh dear, thank you dear.”

It’s not until she ushes him in the bathroom with one of Peter’s sweaters that he notices the wet patch on his uniform’s shirt. He didn’t feel it because of the undershirt but yeah, now he can see why Aunt May reacted like that. She’s always reacted more fiercely than Mrs Parker….

 

 

 

A while later Harry is nibbling at a cookie, reviewing History - he’s got a test this week - when Aunt May, after having tilted her head and having been lost looking into space for some minutes, asks him if he wants to go offer Peter some cookies and warm honeyed milk.

Harry thinks that maybe Aunt May is a bit of a witch, or a magical creature. Or maybe she caught a sound he did not.

This is her house, so it makes more sense. “ _For her to be a witch_.” thinks Harry as he tries not to giggle at his own thought and so jostle the tray while he’s going up the stairs.

He arrives at destination safely, and this time he doesn’t find a heap of messy blankets.

A couple of them are thrown off and halfway on the floor, another couple are all wrinkled but obviously empty. Harry thinks that maybe Peter is digging something fresh out of his closet so he lays down the cookies and the cup.

A minute later a soft pad shocks Harry out of his reverie.

Oh, of course, the loo. He thinks as he takes in Peter’s  figure at the door.

He has obvious shadows under his eyes, which Harry didn’t notice in the semi-darkness of their alcove. His hair is barely tamed and his nose is bright red, along with his cheeks. He looks a bit better with his sweater pants and soft wool pullover.

Peter’s looking at him like he’s trying to solve a puzzle, and after a little “Oh.” of realization, Harry looks down to himself. Oh. The sweater. The tears.

“Sorr-” starts Peter, looking down dejectedly.

“Don’t worry about that. More importantly, those cookies are really good.” interrupts Harry perching on a corner of the bed.

Peter shoots him a grateful look before digging in quietly, and Harry finds nothing better to do than smoothing the duvets back to normal and sitting comfortably back on the bed.

“Thanks for..” trails Peter off.

“Mmh.”

“How did you..How did you know?” Harry sneers when he looks up but Peter looks genuinely curious.

“You called.” says Harry with a frown. “You called my house this morning to tell me you wouldn’t go to school so we weren’t going to meet up.” Harry can add the last part safely, there aren't any of his father's 'ears' to hear and report back.

It’s Peter’s time to frown. “Oh. It must have been Uncle Ben. I didn’t...I didn’t call you. I didn’t exactly do anything this morning, until you came.”

“It’s fine.” Peter shoots him a disbelieving look and Harry shrugs.

“It’s Friday so i can stay here. I’ll ask my father but I don’t think he’ll say no, and Aunt May and Uncle Ben will probably ask him for me. If they haven’t already.”  says Harry waggling his eyebrows in what he hopes is a funny expression and indeed - finally! - he is rewarded with the hint of a smile.

“ _But on Monday you are coming back to school, right?_ ” asks Harry in his mind, but he pushes back that question for later. Plus, Peter, with his hoarse, tired voice, is talking.

“So, History test this week?”

“How do you know?” asks Harry on instict, but it somehow makes Peter blush a bit and fiddle with the edge of his desk.  “You told me..earlier.”

That’s right, Harry told Peter about his day when his friend wouldn’t talk to him. So he _was_ listening.

“Yeah.”

Peter walks quietly towards the bed, eyes still downcast, as if worried or sorry, although Harry doesn’t see why he should be any of them.

“Do you want to tell me what is it on?” asks Peter in the smalest voice and Harry takes in his red-rimmed eyes, his red-tinted nose, his fiddling hands, and he thinks there's another question underneath.

It’s an inquire, or more like a plead,  to stay.

It’s a question  that probably goes like ‘ _am i going to be alone? are they gone forever?_ ’. And Harry shrugs his 10 years off of himself and makes grabby hands like a child.

Peter scrambles up instantly.

But as Harry narrates what they are studying in class, Peter’s hand circles his elbow and doesn’t let go. Harry crosses his legs, like Peter did,  until their knees bump together and taps a light, repetitive rythym onto his best friend’s calves.

And Harry thinks, it's like a pinky-promise to stay, stay and sleep tightly curled around each other, watch the sun rise out of this northward room, have breakfast with Peter, play together, do some homework, watch cartoons, wait till dinnertime, eat dinner with Peter and his relatives, now his family, and go back to sleep again, with his best friend.

It’s a defeated admission that yes, they are probably gone forever, but he could be Peter’s forever... maybe.

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
